


natural disaster

by plastiswafers



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Roman Catholicism, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-20 22:09:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4804049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plastiswafers/pseuds/plastiswafers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He used to think that you could find anybody if you just looked hard enough. Nobody disappears, not really, not if you know who to talk to and where to put the right pressure.</p><p>Matt is a lot less stupid now. Sometimes, things go into the ether. They don't always come back out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	natural disaster

**Author's Note:**

> For this [prompt](http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/1296.html?thread=2058000#cmt2058000).

Matt is twelve years old when two earthquakes hit Umbria in quick succession. The basilica of St. Francis up on its hillside is devastated, its doors shut to the public, spider veins run rampant through Giotto’s frescoes and his bones rattled in their crypt. The Vatican expresses its grief and Matt, who will one day be thirty years old without once leaving the great state of New York, shares their sadness with a potency he had not expected and does not understand.

Stick has been gone for one year. Matt misses him in the offhand way he misses most things, like his sight and his father, but mostly he misses having something to do. He lies on his bed and listens to the pitter patter of footsteps up and down the stairs as he stares blankly up and imagines the cracks in the ceiling. He learns to identify who’s who by the weight of their steps and their daily routines; after a week, he thinks he can identify each one if only by the tap of a pinkie toe.

There’s no challenge to it. He’s terribly bored.

He has commandeered the TV room for himself. All of the other children are too disturbed by the notion of the blind boy watching his programs to bother with fighting him, so Matt settles in on the cracked leather of the couch and resolves to stay there for the entire afternoon. The TV is old, its rabbit ears crooked, the reception subject to the whims of the drafty room; it’s been wavering in and out of PBS for the better part of an hour, some John Muir episode of _American Masters_ blathering on while Matt dozes.

And he’s asleep longer than he realized, because he wakes up and John Muir has trundled off into the wilderness to be replaced by a special on St. Francis that Matt swears he’s heard before but can’t remember. It’s in honor of the earthquakes, Matt thinks, and the eleven people who died in them, and _Sermon To The Birds_ stripped of her elegance by tectonics and time—or else it’s just a coincidence he’s constructed for himself in his own mind, but he doubts that. He doesn’t think much of coincidences.

The host has a soothing, deliberate contralto with which she glosses over the lifetime of St. Francis in the course of an hour. There are images, of course, which are lost on him, but that’s the nice thing about public access programming: the money’s never in the visuals.

He traces the story and considers each beat before she arrives to them herself. St. Francis: born rich but lived poor, suffering rapturously in his penitence on the outskirts of Assisi, building chapels and nativities and taming wild wolves. Francis the saint, the purifier, the man who built an entire order from nothing and changed church history with his goodness—even the secular account, the PBS crowd pleaser that tries to consider what is or is not true, can’t help but be revelatory about a man who was a saint, yes, but also a man.

Matt hears the story wind down but the abrupt cut to credits still hit him like a ton of bricks, because they’ve skipped his favorite part. St. Francis was an old man when he scaled Mount La Verna but he scaled it all the same; he met an angel with six wings and a message for him in the form of holes through its hands and chest and feet and St. Francis prayed and then the angel’s pain was his pain as well, the divinity of the stigmata brought to him in imitation of Christ. And Matt might never go to Italy, and he certainly will never see the portraits of St. Francis that constitute the walls of his church in his hometown—but Matt thinks he knows the man’s revelation and the ecstasy of his suffering. The wounds aren’t real but he can feel the pain, he can feel the blood, hot and thick as it drips from his hands and his sides to the church floor cold beneath his feet.

 

***

 

Henrietta Ruiz, 19, went missing from her two-bedroom 37th and 10th apartment at precisely 11:06 p.m., vanished from her living room as her mother went to get ready for bed. Anthony Callery, 21, disappeared sometime between eight and midnight on a beer run that never seemed to fully materialize. Charlotte Popko, 17, is gone for over a day before anyone realizes that she’s not just playing hooky from homeroom—an assumption, as her economics teacher points out, that nobody would fault her for making.

Matt’s computer spits their names out dutifully, the AP blurb parroting the police blotter with rapturous accuracy and absolutely nothing else. He runs his fingers over the contours of their names two, three, four times, smudging his hands over the photos of their faces that he wishes he could see. It’s raining that afternoon, and has been for the past week; the raindrops obscure sound as it moves farther away, and he feels numb, blindsided. There’s nothing to connect them except the coincidence of their timing; Matt didn’t hear any of them leave.

The streets are sticky wet and the concrete squelches under Matt’s shoes, each step a splash in a puddle that makes his skin crawl all the way up the back of his legs. It’s worse now that the sun’s down: every bit of residual heat has evaporated, leaving his fingers as icy as the streets want to be.

He’s in a terrible mood. That’s usually a good sign.

“Want to try again?” It’s not a question. The man in front of him is terrified, his heartbeat erratic, perspiration beading around his forehead and his armpits and the inside of his elbows. It makes Matt’s stomach roll and twist; it makes him want to throw another punch.

“I—I never heard that name before in my life. Honest to God.”

The man’s compatriot is crumpled in a heap next to him, down for the count on a punch that Matt had intended as more of a warning than a one hit KO. There’s blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth and into the puddle of stagnant water where he’s half-submerged his face; turn his head thirty degrees to the left and he’d drown within minutes, shallow water laying him even lower. His defeat does not appear to have infused his partner with much of a fighting spirit.

It’s only a matter of time until he gives up on lying, too.

“He’s kept you honest in the past, then? Seems unlikely.”

“I—what?”

“God. You’re swearing to him, so apparently you think that your word to his means something. And yet here you are, lying.”

“It’s just an expression, man.” Beat. “And I’m not lying!”

Alonso Batista has a permanent limp in his left leg from a car accident as a child that left his mother dead and his limbs twisted beneath him, pressed at odd angles between the sweltering metal of the shredded car and the pavement below. He works at the 7-Eleven on Dyer; he sells cigarettes and energy shots to commuters about to brave the Lincoln Tunnel and aches miserably from eight hour shifts all on his feet.

Matt kicks Alonso right below the kneecap, just where the scar tissue has built up to its knottiest worst, and slams a hand over his mouth before Alonso can scream—or, more accurately, just _as_ Alonso screams, a gurgling, wet noise that makes Matt grind the heel of his hand into his gums.

“Henrietta Ruiz,” Matt repeats. “You worked the same shift. Several, in fact. There’s security footage.” A bluff, though it’s one that could possibly be true. Not that Matt would know. The subtext is what matters, anyway: _I did not find you by accident._

Alonso’s still in pain, still reveling in it, still thinking about it instead of the question. Matt lets go abruptly, his support gone in a second, and Alonso is on the ground, coughing and shaking just like his friend.

And still no answer.

“I didn’t do anything,” Alonso says. “Not—I didn’t do anything to her, you know? Someone offered me a hundred bucks if I told him when her next shift was, and I told him. I swear that’s it. I _swear_ that’s it.”

It’s not a lie, or at least he doesn’t think it is. Matt crouches down so that Alonso can get a good look at him, if he wants; he listens to the drip of the blood down his teeth but knows that that’s it, that Alonso’s not in danger of even a hint of internal bleeding. More’s the pity.

“So tell me about this man.”

 

***

 

If Matt were a man interested in mirrors, now would be when he stands in front of his full length reflection to appraise his wounds.

That, unfortunately, is not an option.

He stretches out on his couch, carefully, and removes his shirt with the consideration of a person who is used to fabric sticking to open wounds. Matt toes off his shoes, leisurely, and begins the lengthy process of probing his fingers up and down his ribs, his arms, across his shoulders. He can feel two points of impact already: they throb beneath the skin that he knows have already purpled into messy bruises, but he knows better than to think that's the extent of it. There's always something more: an ache he doesn't notice until he bumps it against Karen's desk, a paper thin cut that still oozes blood hours later, a headache that won't go away.

But Alonso was not much of a fighter. There's a pain in Matt's left hip from a desperate roundhouse kick and warm, radiating hurt out of the ankle on the same side. He'll probably be limping tomorrow, much like Alonso himself, but there's nothing to do except grab an ice pack and perhaps an aspirin.

Matt gets up and hobbles to the bedroom, where he splays out on his bed and pushes the button on his clock that spits out the time. _One thirty a.m._

Henrietta Ruiz has been gone for over seventy-two hours; Charlotte over forty-eight; Anthony just coming up on a day, a full twenty-four hours off the grid with nobody to account for him. The police have opened a lackadaisical investigation; nobody has any real reason to believe that the three of them are connected. Alonso's description of the man who'd approached him is frustratingly vague. Thirties, but maybe forties. Clean-shaven, but perhaps with a little bit of stubble. Dark-haired. Hadn't supplied a name, and Alonso hadn't asked for one. An anybody and a nobody all at once.

Matt's sheets are improbably intoxicating, their silky smoothness a delicacy that Matt has not seen fit to deny himself. His eyelids flutter shut one, two, three times only to snap back open again. The image is the same, but the intent is decidedly different.

He sits up abruptly and ignores his ankle's screaming protest when he climbs out of bed and walks to the bathroom. Behind the unused bathroom mirror is a medicine cabinet. Matt's fingers graze over a few of the bottles, trying to remember whether the bottle with the notched cap is Tylenol or antacid, before settling on their real target.

Matt shaves with a disposable razor the likes of which he discovered at the dollar store around age seventeen and has never seen fit to question. The straight razor that sits on the right side of the middle shelf is an antique from some abstracted elder Murdock male, an artifact that Matt pulled out of his childhood apartment but not one that had belonged to his father in any meaningful sense.

The razor belongs to Matt. He knows it's sharp but tests the edge anyway; the tiniest of cuts bursts forth from the tip of his thumb and the smell of the room is immediately tinged with iron and hemoglobin.

His head hurts, and not from the fight. Even alone in his apartment and Matt can feel overwhelmed, like the earth is tilting on its axis away from him and leaving him behind, grasping for purchase and being stung instead. He leans against the bathroom sink; the metal of the razor is already warming in his hands.

When he was younger, Matt favored his legs as the easiest place to cover up in general company and the easiest scars to explain away as a childhood mishap or three. Now, he knows that the torso is the way to go: the major arteries are deeper, and his abdomen is littered with enough remnants of fights already that a few additions aren't that much more.

It would be easier, of course, if Alonso Batista had had the dignity to fight well. If he were a real criminal he could have managed it, but Matt has run into depressingly few real criminals in his time in Hell's Kitchen. Alonso, like too many, was barely more than an opportunist.

And maybe Matt is an opportunist, too. His hands are steady as he makes the first cut just over his right ribs, a deliberate line that is subcutaneous only so far as to let it bleed—and bleed it does, in a dripping waterfall inching its way to the waist of his sweatpants. Three people are gone and probably dead, and Alonso Batista needs to learn to throw a punch, and Matt could he out there looking but instead he's in here instead, getting high off endorphins and playing the martyr-saint in his walk-up.

The next two cuts are deeper, but only barely, and placed as mock haphazardly as Matt can manage. His pain tolerance is getting higher, which Matt supposes he should have probably expected. A year ago, this might have been enough. His head is pleasantly muggy now, obscured, thoughts drifting back and forth but mostly _hurts hurts hurts_ at the front of his mind.

And yet: Henrietta Ruiz, Anthony Callery, Charlotte Popko. He hears their voices even though he's never heard them before, even though he should have heard them back when they cried for help the first time. It's like wandering drunk through a fog: the world is obfuscated as best as he can manage but the signs are there all the same, beckoning him onward with great prejudice.

So Matt's hand doesn't slip but he lets himself pretend that it does, and the cut just over his bellybutton is deeper than the rest but not so deep he has to be scared of where it's going to go. He stands there for a minute and revels in it, only for a moment, and the blood running across his fingers and down his stomach is in that moment exactly what he needs.

 

***

 

"Rough night?"

Foggy is angry at him, but he cares about him. He likes Matt, but he doesn't trust him. These are all facts that Matt is well aware of, and even understanding of, but no less hurt by. It makes days at Nelson and Murdock somewhat of a literal trial.

Matt keeps his voice low, because Karen is filing papers in the other room but could emerge at any minute. "There've been some kidnappings," he says. "Or...disappearances, maybe. Not sure if they're connected, but I think so. I was looking for answers."

"Right. Because you're the answer guy. What do the police think?"

"They're working on it."

"But not fast enough."

"Just not _enough_. I think they're just waiting for these kids to resurface on their own."

"Did you find anything useful?"

"Maybe. Not sure yet. I'm going to have to go out and see if it means anything."

Foggy exhales deeply and the hinges of his desk chair creak as he rocks backward. He's frustrated now; Matt has a feeling the conversation is about to become very circular.

"So I'm going to remind you for like, the eight millionth time that this isn't your job," Foggy says, "and your job wasn't to take down Wilson Fisk and it sure as hell isn't to do...investigative vigilante-ing, or whatever this is. And I'm also going to remind you that you gotta stop coming into work looking like a domestic violence PSA, because it makes me worried and it makes Karen worried and then we combine into one big worry Megatron. And that kind of super worry bot is hard to defuse."

Matt stiffens; Foggy sighs again. "You've got a huge freaking bruise on your neck, man—it looks like Lestat came and took a chomp out of you." He pauses, like this is a new angle. " _Did_ Lestat come and take a chomp out of you? Because that might be a little less freaky than thinking that you literally didn't notice this."

This is what always happens, Matt thinks. He always forgets something. "No vampires," he says. "Just distracted."

Foggy laughs, but humorlessly. "Then I would recommend you invest in some Adderall, because it looks like you _really_ need it."

 

***

 

The police scanner is scratchy in a way that grates on every single one of Matt's senses and the officers mostly speak in codes he hasn't had the time or inclination to memorize yet. He streams it on his computer for forty-five minutes while he ices his ankle, but after the fifth report of drunk and disorderly behavior the frustration overtakes him, and Matt slams his laptop shut with a little more force than was probably necessary.

It's extraordinarily tiring to be on all the time; Matt knows this because he's been listening all day, concentrating underneath his conversations with Foggy and Karen and the postman and Delilah who lives next door. The bits and details hit him like a heat wave. Two blocks away, a man blows his nose three times in quick succession. A young couple has a fight in front of the Bank of America ATM about where his last paycheck has gone (Matt would guess alcohol, judging from the way he's stumbling and swaying on his feet). The pipes in the building next door are rattling and old and leaking water every time anyone takes a shower.

Matt hears a lot of things, all of which conspire to give him the world's most truly incredible headache. He does not, however, hear anything of use. He hears no clandestine murmurings, no stifled screams, no police cadets talking among themselves about an open missing persons file.

He used to think that you could find anybody if you just looked hard enough. Nobody disappears, not really, not if you know who to talk to and where to put the right pressure.

Matt is a lot less stupid now. Sometimes, things go into the ether. They don't always come back out.

He has work the next day; his leg aches, stiff and numbing from being propped up on his coffee table and subjected to an ice pack. The city is still damp from rain and the streets are slick with oil and water on pavement.

But Matt itches, a tremor under his skin that he never quite learned how to control. The cuts on his stomach pulse, but not hard enough. A woman is being mugged four blocks away, and Matt probably can't get there in time to do anything, but maybe he can, if he runs fast enough.

He opens the latch to the storage under his stairs, and takes out the suit.

 

***

 

Matt wakes up the next morning and his ankle is swollen and tender to the touch. It hurts in a far off, absent sort of way, the kind of hurt that makes his thoughts drift to the razor in his medicine cabinet. He goes to work instead. It's difficult to walk, but he does so anyway.

He waits a full twelve hours before calling Claire.

"I think I broke my ankle," he confesses.

"You broke your ankle? Or someone broke it for you?" He can hear the clang of pots and pans in the background; she's probably cooking. It makes him want to hang up the phone and pretend the whole thing was a joke.

"Combination of the two, really."

"That's quite an accomplishment."

"They're thinking of giving me some kind of medal for cooperation."

"So you need me to set it for you?"

"And possibly rebreak it. I think it might have already healed a little strangely—I'm not a hundred percent sure how these things work."

"When did you say you broke it, again?"

"Two days ago."

She hangs up the phone. Matt takes that as indication she's on her way.

He hears her arrive before she even walks into the building. Claire has a specific, harried sort of gait inevitably developed from being a specific, harried sort of nurse. She takes each step quickly, but with deliberation. If he concentrates enough, he can hear the way her hips swivel while she walks.

Matt would very much like to kiss her. Instead, Claire walks into his apartment unannounced and pauses when she reaches the couch. He imagines that she's looking at him up and down with pursed lips; he imagines he's quite the sight.

"Anyone ever told you how stupid you are?"

He grins despite himself. "Maybe once or twice."

Her fingers are much more tender than his own as she pokes and prods around the bone. Matt forces himself not to temper his own reactions; it's not useful to pretend it doesn't hurt when it does. It's only Claire. She's not going to hold it against him.

Eventually, she pulls back and begins rummaging around in the bag next to her on the coffee table. "There's no real way for me to tell if it's broken without an x-ray," she says slowly, "and I'm guessing you're not about to come down to the hospital with me. But I think it's only a fracture at most. I brought an ankle brace that you better swear to God you're gonna wear."

He'll wear it when it's not too much of a hassle. "Of course."

"And how come I already know that you're lying to me?" She shakes her head, her ponytail swishing in the air behind her. "Don't answer that—I don't need to know. Now get that shirt off."

Matt freezes. "That's awfully forward of you," he says, smiling weakly.

"I can see that bruise under your collar." She sighs, like she's gearing up to have the fight she always has with him. "You have to let me take care of you completely or I'm not going to do it at all. I'm not just your first aid kit."

This, Matt decides, is the problem with getting decent people to help you out: they always want to be decent at the most inconvenient times; Claire doubles down on the problem by being so uniquely resistant to manipulation. Finally, he sighs and sits up to pull off his shirt. He wonders if Claire is frowning.

They are silent for a moment while Claire examines him. Matt closes his eyes and tries to pretend that her touch is soothing enough to lull him into sleep. Her hand rests above his hip right where it hurts the most, and he hears her breathing change as she works up the will to say something. "So this just some random fight, or are you chasing specific bad guys again?"

 _Combination of the two,_ Matt wants to say, again. "I was trying to get information," he says instead. "There's...a few kids have disappeared this week. Found a guy who might know something."

"Did you find them?"

"Not yet."

She doesn't say anything, just sits still. Matt thinks she might be staring at some part of him he can't see; it makes him want to squirm like a child. "These cuts," she says, forced like the words are being physically dragged out of her. "They look surgical. Like someone had the opportunity to be deliberate. They don't look like something out of a fight."

Matt's breath catches in his chest. He used to have any number of probable cop outs in the back of his head for scenarios like this, but most of them had fallen long into disuse, paling in comparison to "Hello, I'm a vigilante." He gives Claire his best shrug. "One of them had a knife. I wasn't paying much attention to the fine details."

Claire's hand squeezes on his side; he doesn't think it was intentional. "Hey," she says, her voice impossibly soft. "If those guys got one over on you, you can tell me. No judgment. It looks like someone thought about dissecting you."

It requires all of the self-control that Stick ever taught him for Matt to stop himself from laughing out loud—laughing at the thought of Alonso Batista getting one over on him, at the thought of Claire thinking she's figured it out, at the thought of where the cuts came from in the first place.

He catches her hand as it drifts up his chest. He thinks about kissing it, but settles for running his thumb over her knuckles instead. "It doesn't matter," he says. It's the concession she's looking for without actually being a concession. "But I'll admit, they could use your expert stitching. I didn't even bother this time because I knew you'd just have to rip them out."

It's not that she's necessarily convinced, but she is mollified. "Damn straight," Claire says. "Now hand me my gauze."

 

***

 

Two weeks later, the police find Charlotte. Her body floats to the surface face down in the Hudson River, still dressed in the uniform she would have been wearing on the day she disappeared. The authorities suspect suicide.

Matt hates the docks, where the sloshing of the water puts him on edge and convinced that he's hearing people behind him when he's only hearing echoing waves. The pollutants in the river sting his nose and all of the surrounding areas always seem to be covered in a thin film salt that rubs off on his fingers even when he can't remember touching anything.

The police have long since cleared out the area and the dock workers have long since gone home. Idle security guards protecting particularly important shipments are scattered here and there, but they don't see Matt and he doesn't have any interest in them.

It only takes about twenty minutes for the man to realize that Matt's following him, and only because Matt gets sick of waiting and decides to make his presence known with a cough.

"What do you think you're playing at, huh?"

Matt's fist connects satisfactorily in the dead center of the man's throat; it wrests out a choked scream and the man coughs desperately, trying to get whatever air he can. He collapses to the ground and Matt kicks him in the chest with a sharp jab.

"You were there," Matt says. "People saw you—a man saw you, one of the workers. You were there on the jetty and then she was dead in the water—but the police think she killed herself. She didn't kill herself."

The man doesn't respond. Matt kicks him again, and the man coughs long and wetly.

"Admit it," Matt says. "Admit she didn't kill herself."

"She didn't kill herself."

The confession comes a lot more quickly than Matt had expected, and he's almost disappointed. He gives the man another kick for good measure. "So who did?"

"Not me," the man says immediately. He tries to sit up, so Matt places his foot firmly on his stomach and pushes him back down. "She was—she was dead when they gave her to me. They don't tell me anything."

"Who doesn't tell you anything?"

The man laughs weakly. "You think they tell me that shit? You think I get anything other than a set of instructions and a paycheck?"

His heartbeat is jackrabbit fast but that's just from Matt—or to be more accurate, Matt's foot. He's not lying, and that almost makes it worse.

"There were two others," Matt says. "Taken at the same time as her. Tell me what you know."

"I don't know anything. I know jack fucking shit." The truth, again. "But I can tell you without knowing that whoever they are, they're dead. That's what these people do, man. You don't pay your debts and they make you dead. Or your kid dead, or your friend, or whatever. Not anything any of us can do about it." He spits on the ground. "Especially not you."

Matt could crush his throat right then and there if he really wanted to. He's thought about it enough times with enough people and come perilously close almost as often, but he restrains himself, because Matt is a hero.

He kicks the man one more time, right in his diaphragm, and walks away.

 

***

 

Later, when Matt is swabbing his razor with a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol and resisting the urge to touch the several new additions to his previous night's work, he wonders what Father Lantom would say. He imagines himself in confessional, dim church light filtering through the lattice. _Father Lantom,_ he would say, _Did you know it was the saints themselves that gave me the idea?_ Always getting stabbed, burned, shot by arrows, hit with axes, starving to death; it's as gruesome as any horror movie Matt's ever heard of, and he was always expected to take it to heart. That's what the pious _really_ do.

The towel he holds to his stomach is slowly getting wet against his finger tips, and Matt's going to have to eat a lot of spinach this weekend to make up for all the iron he's undoubtedly losing. He wonders if St. Francis ever knew to eat spinach when he had blood dripping like rainfall from the wounds in his sides.

He rinses the razor and dries it carefully before putting it back in his spot. It's the hair shirt of the twenty-first century, he wants to tell someone. It's penitence, and five hundred years ago, that would have been enough. Except that's not true, not really.

A martyr does it for God. Matt knows by now that he's only ever been in it for himself.

 


End file.
